The BFI’s eagerly awaited John Cassavetes Collection kicks off with his debut film, the 1959 semi-improvised Shadows. Often hailed as the first American independent film – which is rather questionable – the movie is a gritty but flawed drama that is influenced by Italian neo-realism and feels like a feature-length version of the underground movies that were beginning to emerge at the time.

The film follows the lives of a group of beats and what would later be defined as slackers who are connected, sometimes tenuously, to the New York jazz scene and art world (ironically, the very world portrayed in Johnny Staccato, the amazing jazz-detective show that Cassavetes starred in around this time). Drifting through life, picking up girls, getting into rumbles and making shady deals, they are a mix of feigned pretension and even more feigned ignorance. At the heart of events are struggling and intense jazz singer Hugh (Hugh Herd), his tearaway younger brother Ben (Ben Carruthers) and his naïve sister Leila (Leila Goldoni), and the film’s main dramatic vignette centres on Leila’s affair with Italian-American Tony (Anthony Ray) who fails to realise that she’s black until he meets her darker skinned older brother, revealing his prejudice inadvertently but clearly.

Backed with a freewheeling score from Charles Mingus and Shafi Hadi, Shadows is probably as close to a movie version of free jazz as you could find. While there are dramatic elements, they often go nowhere, and the film is instead content to be little more than a slice of life, with no beginning or end - a journey without a destination. This is both the strength of the film and the weakness – several supporting characters come and go without ever being developed and a number of possible plot strands are left dangling, but the film’s cine-verite approach makes this randomness work – it feels more like a documentary than a conventional narrative story. Unfortunately, technical issues tend to pull you out of the story – the original footage suffered from poor sound and other flaws, and some scenes were later shot with a more conventional, non-improvised style, while all-too-obvious post-production dialogue was added. Sometimes this works – dialogue looping wasn’t exactly unknown in documentaries of the time – and sometimes it doesn’t.

Certainly, compared to Cassavetes’ later works, Shadows is very crude. But it’s got an urgency and authenticity about it that makes it a compelling experience, despite the rough edges and the fact that no-one in the movie seems particularly sympathetic. And it’s a hugely important film - both in style and in its fierce independence, the movie would have a major influence on some of the best filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies, starting a wave of gritty realism that increasingly swept through those two decades. For that reason alone, it’s essential viewing.

This new Blu-ray/DVD combo set offers a restored version of the film with several impressive extras – an audio commentary from actor Seymour Cassel and film critic Tom Charity, an interview with frequent collaborator Peter Falk and 16mm footage of Cassavetes’ acting workshop (all video extras only on the DVD) and the usual impressive booklet. Missing, sadly, is the original fully improvised 1958 version that was rediscovered a decade ago.

DAVID FLINT

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